The present invention relates to an indicator post which can be employed for actuating and indicating the status of underground or wall mounted valves.
Indicator posts are employed with water supply systems, particularly those employed in in commercial establishments and also in fire sprinkler water supplies to actuate valves supplying water to such systems. They specifically provide a visual display of the status of the valve as open or shut. Due to different mounting of such valves either underground or within the walk of the buildings in other installations, the design of the indicator posts have been different requiring different castings for use in connection with the manufacture and assembly of such indicator posts.
Upright posts used with underground valves typically have a removable handle which can be locked once the valve is in the desired position and is removed and attached to an operating stem for the actuation of the valve. As the handle is rotated, a threaded sleeve associated with the operating stem moves a bogie having display targets with indicia indicating the open or shut position of the associated valve. Depending on the valve employed and its size, the rotation required to fully open and shut a valve can vary from 9 to 50 or more complete turns. Thus it is necessary to have the indicator targets adjustable to allow for the difference in number of rotations of the operating rod coupled to the different valves. With past indicator posts, it has been necessary to disassemble the bogie assembly and move the individual open or shut targets to their respective positions when the valve is fully opened or fully shut. This adjustment has required considerable effort.
Similarly, with wall mounted indicator posts, the number of turns required utilizing, typically a handwheel, varies with the valve type and again the indicator post targets move a distance related to the number of turns the valve requires to fully open or fully shut. Such wall mounted posts also have required disassembly for the synchronization of the indicating targets with the valve handwheel rotation.
Thus there exists a need for an indicator post which can be used for both upright indicator posts used for underground valves as wall as wall mounted indicator posts for wall mounted valves utilizing the same components. Further, it would be desirable to have indicator targets which can be easily adjustable to display either open or shut positions regardless of the number of rotations required for given valve to move between fully open and fully shut positions.